


drape you on tomorrow's plate

by ghostoftonantzin



Category: What We Do in the Shadows (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-02
Updated: 2020-11-02
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:22:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27341176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghostoftonantzin/pseuds/ghostoftonantzin
Summary: It's a lot of effort for what amounts to one meal.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 19





	drape you on tomorrow's plate

**Author's Note:**

> I spent the afternoon reading Angela Carter, if that explains this.
> 
> Title from Neko Case's "Hell-On".

There were always men and women. Most often regular people, in their office clothes and the grime of everyday life, to be consumed and disposed of perfunctorily. But sometimes there was the veneer of romance, when his master would leach out of the shadows to wine and dine and then dine on his victim.

She was tall, standing in the doorway, which somehow surprised Guillermo, and thin in a way that reminded him of a newborn foal on shaky legs. He ushered her into the library, where he would be expected to make small talk while his master built up anticipation for his entrance.

She was pretty, and pretty young, he guessed. She was new to the city, and she tucked a lock of dark hair behind her ear as she smiled at Guillermo with the air of two strangers sharing a giddy secret.

Guillermo, who had rarely left the city except for a visit to the capitol in middle school, did his best to smile back at her.

Guillermo wondered if Nandor had known there would be no one waiting up for her, not in the city or anywhere. Probably not. Lucky coincidence.

She saw him look at the pearls around her neck, and seemed aware of how incongruous they seemed, hanging over her inexpensive top. Her grandmother’s, she said, touching them almost apologetically. The candlelight danced across them and almost made them glow from within. She had seen the gap, then, between herself and Nandor, his face like something wrought from marble and her twenty-first century looks, and tried to make herself something like what he must have seen in her.

The pearls looked real. It was harder to fence women’s jewelry, something he usually left for when Laszlo and Nadja had recruited another young woman to be their familiar. Less suspicious to say she was pawning her inheritance than for him to appear blameless at the pawnshop’s counter.

He liked to think he had developed an eye for it, the size of chain links and color of stones that indicated the difference between a treasured heirloom and a whim in the shopping cart. He was sometimes wrong, of course, and he tended to lean on the age of the person. The older the victim, the more valuable, generally.

His master came down the stairs from some back room, in his long velvet cloak that Guillermo had washed carefully and sprayed with perfume, to mask the cold, metallic scent that clung to his body like condensation on a glass. Guillermo tried not to examine his emotions too carefully, to think how she would be sitting near enough to notice something deathlike about him in the dark of the theatre.

It was really a waste for him to spend an evening watching some blockbuster that he would scarcely understand, carefully collecting questions about the plot to bring back for Guillermo. Of course, vampires had all the time in the world, and Nandor could spend his time how he saw fit.

He couldn’t bear to see her face when his master darkened the doorway, like looking into his own reflection from years ago, so he told them to enjoy their evening and went back to his room.

He could see them come in from this vantage point, later. He had his arm hooked through hers, and if not for the cut of her jeans and the modern angles of her face, they could be an ancient portrait, backlit by the lights illuminating the topiaries. He saw him escort her to his room, a hand placed tentatively on her back. A gentleman, though he predated the concept as Guillermo had been raised to know it.

Guillermo heard the door to his crypt click decisively closed, and crept across the front hall to bolt the door.

He didn’t know what his master would be doing with her behind the crypt door. He knew, of course. He could imagine the contours of the evening, would clean up after the ending. But he could only guess at the seduction, whether he would take a tendril of her long hair between his fingers or splay her hand open in his. The particulars of the victim never mattered when he was reopening this wound, their faces interchangeable as mannequins.

There was the fear, of course, that he would be enamored and swayed by her ungainly charms, and there would be a second coffin and someone else cutting in front of him in line. How dare they, how easily he would slip her out of her clothes and offer to keep her, letting her shed all the awkward trappings of her human body in the way he ached to.

He didn’t hear her scream, just her footsteps on the rugs in the front hall. She was fast. Her legs carried her to the front door with the dexterity of someone used to sprinting short distances, and Guillermo realized with a sickening lurch that if she made it through the front door, she would start screaming to disturb the whole neighborhood.

She didn’t even get to the lock on the front door. It was only when Nandor grabbed her in a blur of black cloth that she started screaming, a horrific terrified sound like she knew how this would end.

She doesn’t die in the front hall, of course. He drags her back to his room for privacy, finicky eater that he is, though likely unaware of Guillermo’s eyes on him. It would be nice, he thinks, to be able to see him drain her, to draw the curtains closed on one part of his jealousy at least for the night.

The screaming dies out eventually, and the body drops to the floor with barely a sound. He must have fed kneeling then, crouched possessively over her neck. He would have had to hold her in his arms.

His master didn’t disturb him again that night, but there were the pearls the next evening, coiled over themselves on the table in the hall, the clasp carefully unfastened and their lacquer undisturbed by blood.

**Author's Note:**

> I just want to say that it always bothers me in fiction when a strand of pearls breaks and they spill everywhere, because a strand of pearls worth anything is going to be knotted in between each pearl. That has nothing to do with this fic, I just have to put that energy somewhere.


End file.
